Reading towards Political Puppetry

No art form is intrinsically political in any particular direction. Ballet was nominated by Soviet Russia to impress the rest of the world, despite its roots in the aristocratic French courts. There is something to be said for the rise of theatre during the early outbreak of democracy in classical Athens, but the French stage kept operating under the Nazi occupation. Freedom of speech generally helps, but given that it existed only in censored form in the UK until 1968 (when the Lord Chamberlain stopped being allowed to edit or ban scripts), it isn't essential to art.

The appearance by some large scale puppets at the Seattle protests in 1999 led to optimistic studies of "radical puppetry" breaking out across the net. Making the point that puppets had become slave of consumerism - the Muppets and Sooty being emasculated versions of Mr Punch, made polite for public consumption - these studies tended to concentrate on the presence of puppetry from medieval times in various protests. Various periods where puppetry was suppressed are held up as evidence that object manipulation is subversive and the ambiguous relationship of certain left-wing states to puppetry was rightly mentioned with caution. 

However, phrases like "the history of puppetry in service to the people, the tradition of puppetry as the voice of the everyman, the expression of dissent, protest, the real and human concerns of daily life" suggest that a close look at puppetry will reveal a new narrative, an alternative reality where Muffin the Mule is tearing up paving stones on the streets of Paris and Sweep is throwing a Black Power salute.

K Ruby Blume does relate a version of this history with more verve and nuance than most. Starting with the emergence of puppets in the church's passion plays in the 700s, she stops off at various moments in history to note the use of counter-cultural puppetry. Enthusiastic for the DIY quality of the mannequin, she captures the uncanny inhumanity of the puppet, identifying it as a satirical counter-blast to human folly. 

Meanwhile, Kerry Mogg follows a similar line, albeit with a more direct action emphasis. Quoting Peter Schumann from Bread and Puppet Theatre - one of the companies to emerge from the 1960s with a clear political agenda - Mogg reiterates the problems of tracing alternative histories through the dominant powers' records, claiming that "the real history... has been devalued and discarded."

Although they both ignore the long traditions of puppetry outside of Europe and the USA, both articles assert an optimism for the political impact of the puppet. Mogg sees them as occupying public space in a revolutionary manner: Blume concludes that the invisible puppeteer can give voice to the people. Sharing a view of theatre that primarily classifies it by its social worth, they praise the "carnivalesque" - the spirit of disorder named by named by Bakhtin that appears at festivals and poses a threat to the certainties of the hegemony.

The Christian Science Monitor, oddly enough, homes in on a specific example of the puppeteer as activist. Sara Peattie, of the Puppet Free Lending Library, has made puppets for political demonstrations, from mutated butterflies to demons. Peattie's advocacy of the puppet gets closer to the core of its potential.

"It's easier for people to look at a puppet that expresses discontent rather than a human face, which is so freighted with meaning. Puppets let people stand back from the idea and look at it from a distance where they aren't so implicated that they can't cope with it."

In this description, Peattie sees the aesthetics of the puppet as being crucial to their political role - finding a possible intrinsic quality that makes the puppet 'radical.' Far more immediate than the historical readings, Peattie's vision - and she has had her puppets banned on demonstrations for being weapons - is less concerned with legitimacy through heritage than the actual emotional impact of the object under manipulation.